Notes to the Red team about the Adobe workflow.
In the very near future I believe, Adobe will be the go to system for most Red Users. I am in the Last Stages of finishing a feature length film. I had to take a 2.5 week hiatus because our red camera suffered some hardware damage (no fault to Red). Well in that time I decided to cut a little trailer/teaser for my distributors. Mind you I shot a music video and done some tests with the Red so I am familiar with the post workflow. Well those were short form projects cut on final cut pro, footage exported to pro-res from redcine. The were no effects just color correction in color. Well what I am getting to is this time with almost 2.5 terabytes of footage and a lot of hvx footage for car interiors, chase scenes etc, this simple trailer was hell. I think what I am getting at is Adobe’s ability to handle mixed formats is very important. Red is making a smart choice in its first minor NLE support away from Scratch.
A few important notes .
I am a big fan of Adobe PPro CS3, I have used it on many projects Along side FCP. Red has direct contact with Adobe. Here are some issues with the program I believe Red should quickly point out to Adobe before CS4 comes out. All long formwork crashes with out of memory messages from Premiere whether on the Mac or PC. Audio drifts really badly and a lot of third party plug-ins don’t work. However all of the above except for the plugin is thrown out the door with the use of a hard ware card like Blackmagic, I don’t know why. We also need good XML in and out, omf in and out. The interface is great.
There are a few important tool RED has to be able to create as a plugin or directly link to Premiere like Red alert and Redcine. The best work flow would be to able to directly open clips in a sequence directly in Redcine for correction Red Style. Redcine is 20% of what Color is. I know Red has no reason to want to compete with color in any sense of the word. But I know with the number of Cameras, both motion and still Red is producing I think its important to beef up Redcine, not for competition sake but to Allow Red Users the full satisfaction of the Red Experience. After all everyone knows the software inside the red camera is remarkable, Why not extend this externally. After effects is a good color correction tool but lacks the intuitive simplicity of color. I know Adobe has no plans to enter that market, and frankly it would make no sense for them to. There are good shot to shot plug-ins like Redgiant ‘s Magic Bullet Looks, (which I believe has the potential to be rebuilt into a great final conform tool. This I know will happen in time as the creators use Film master on their own projects and are learning the frame work and infrastructure of a great conform tool) but Redcine offers a whole different approach to working with raw metadata and files. Its arguably the most compelling high end interface since Discreet smoke and Fire. I know I am asking for a lot, but I feel Adobe can really work on the premiere engine for long form feature work, since a whole lot of people will finally look at their program as a viable commercial grade NLE.
All I ask for is RED Talk to Adobe for the good of All
